The popularity of mobile, web-enabled devices like smartphones and tablets is increasing rapidly among businesses and private consumers. According to comScore MobiLens, there were 63.2 million U.S. smartphone users in December 2010, and 48 percent of phone owners can browse the full web on their devices. There are more than 10 different mobile device platforms available in the U.S., and most of them are capable of supporting multiple browsers.
Just as businesses had to adapt rapidly to the proliferation of the Internet, they must continue to adjust their websites to the needs—and the limitations— of mobile platforms. Advances in mobile device technology, improved browser functionality, more reliable Internet connectivity, and the availability of unlimited data plans, have made consumers much more likely to access the web on the go. Many businesses have found that they must update, adjust, or completely reinvent their websites to improve the experience for their mobile visitors.
Website Design & Development Best Practices
To find out if your site is optimized for all of your users and their platforms, start by reviewing the analytics of your existing webpage. The information you find here will help you improve your site’s usability by knowing what operating system and browser combo your customers are using.
Mobile versus Desktop Visitors
How are most of your visitors accessing your site? By tracking the behavior of your mobile visitors and reviewing your site analytics, you can optimize your site by answering these simple questions. How much time do mobile users spend browsing your site versus desktop users? What is their conversion rate on mobile vs. desktop?
Optimize Design for Mobile Platforms
Giving your visitors easy access to relevant information should be your first priority. Again, use analytics to determine what pages and what information most of your visitors are accessing most of the time. Your mobile visitors should be able to reach this information with minimal typing, scrolling, magnifying, or link-clicking. Reformat your mobile site to include the on-demand information as close to the top of the main page as you can. To improve readability, consider changing your font size and style, your background color, and your layout. Webpages with just one column are typically easier to navigate on a smartphone’s vertical screen.
Optimize Cross-Browser & Cross-Platform Functionality
Different smartphones support different browsers that all have unique capabilities and limitations. Your mobile site should be readable and functional regardless of the browser or platform on which it is being viewed. For instance, Android is the only smartphone whose native browser can support Flash, so if you use this type of animation on your site, many of your mobile visitors won’t be able to view it. iPhone is the third most popular device in the U.S. (following Android and Blackberry, respectively), and while it has many rich computing capabilities like video streaming and gaming, it does not support Flash or any other Adobe programs.
Blackberry, which uses its own custom browser, is a very popular phone but has limited capabilities in terms of rich media computing. The upcoming Blackberry 6.0 operating system will be able to support Flash, but until its use becomes more widespread, sites optimized for Blackberry should not contain that type of animation.
To make the most of your website redesign, you should optimize with one or two specific browsers in mind. Determine your target audience: analytics can tell you what browsers and what mobile operating systems most people use to access your site. If the majority of your visitors are using Blackberry or another business-focused platform, your site should have limited graphics and little or no animation. In addition to Android users, Windows Mobile users who have downloaded the Skyfire or Firefox browser can view Flash animation, so you might be able to integrate some of these visual components if the majority of your visitors use those browsers.
Implementing the New Site
Whether you’re going to do a complete rebranding of your site, or if you’re happy with most elements of your current website and just want to refresh it, you need to optimize it for the future. Once you’ve identified which operating systems and browsers most of your visitors use, a web development team can update your site to HTML5 standards that suit the capabilities of those systems. If, for instance, the majority of your visitors are Android users, you may want to include a Flash video on your site. When you have visitors who can’t stream Flash videos, a browser sniffer can detect what browser they are using and display the version compatible to their device or just redirect them to a separate page with elements that their OS can display.
The use of HTML5 as your standard will allow you optimize your site for ease of use and future upgrades.
